Coaches try to avoid compromising situations

Posted: Saturday, June 01, 2002

Jon Mark Beiluejmbeilue@amarillonet.com

If Plainview girls' basketball coach Danny Wrenn has a conference with a player, he makes sure there's another coach with them. When Johnny Cobb was handed girls' wrestling to add to his boys' program, he felt it necessary to have a female assistant.

Greg Slover, Panhandle principal and former girls' basketball coach, doesn't recall ever putting his arm around a girl - for a reason. Amarillo High swimming coach Tim Estes said it was several years before he even hugged one of his swimmers, and, now, he says, "it's sideways and real quick."

And as far as the lockerroom, either avoid going in, or send a female in first to make sure the environment is safe. Those are just some of the precautions taken by high school male coaches responsible for girls' programs.

"The main thing," Estes said, "is to not let anybody have the opportunity to even think that something improper is going on."

Slover's father, Cecil, was a principal, and his mother, Marie, a homemaking teacher. He followed their career paths, and he said he was taught to do what is necessary to stay out of compromising situations.

The Buddy System

"They prepared me for stuff like that from the time I was old enough to understand," said Slover, now boys' basketball coach as well as principal.

"You do not put yourself into a situation that can compromise your character. If there was a one-on-one meeting with a female player, I might have an assistant coach or another third party at the meeting. It didn't matter if it was male or female - I just needed another third party."

Estes has been a coach of boys and girls in the Amarillo Independent School District for 30 years. The experience has taught him some dos and don'ts. He said he almost never has one-on-one discussions with his girls, and if he absolutely has to, it's no longer than 10 minutes. He does not make bed checks on road trips by himself.

"I make sure somebody else is making the check with me," Estes said. "I don't walk into the girls' room without knocking. If the girls come to my room, I make sure someone else is in there with me. If there is an injury that needs taken care of, the whole team is there."

When Cobb took over girls' wrestling at Tascosa, he was able to get Donna Welch as an assistant even though she was a wrestling novice.

"She did not know anything about wrestling," Cobb said, "but has developed into an excellent coach."

Cobb said the nature of coaching wrestling means he has to come into physical contact with girls - as he always does with boys - to show them holds, escapes or takedowns, but he has other methods as well.

"What I'll do a lot of times is have a male wrestler as an aide and use him to demonstrate," Cobb said.

Wrenn has won consecutive 4A state basketball titles at Plainview. His three assistants are female, which he said was not necessarily by design, although he wanted at least one female assistant.

"Absolutely, I use them as a buffer (as a third party or entering the lockerroom first)," Wrenn said. "I don't think it's mandatory for a man to have a female assistant, but you definitely need one. Our situation just happens to be all of them."

What coaches said needs to be avoided most of all is an allegation of "he-said vs. she-said," or the appearance of wrongdoing.

"I may not have shown girls enough affection, but I was guarded against that," Slover said. "The whole deal there is perception. People in the stands just see your arm around a player. They don't know what you're saying. If you give the wrong perception in a small community, it doesn't take but a hint for a guy to get into trouble."

Don't Go It Alone

Wrenn, who is single, can't recall a confidential conversation with a player when it was just the two of them. Usually, it's just the three of them.

"It's just good policy to have somebody with me. If it was a situation where one of my assistants wasn't there, I would try to get the boys' coach there," he said. "You always need someone there to confirm your story."

Or as Slover says, "Being a male, you're at the mercy of females because, whether it's true or not, exaggerated or not, to most people, you're really guilty unless another person is there."

What about instances where a young girl may have a teen-age crush on a coach and may send signals herself that's she interested in more than playing off-guard?

"I have seen some girls have crushes on younger male coaches," Cobb said. "It would be a fallacy to think that doesn't happen. I'm too old, but I've seen that, yes. It's up to that coach to get that straightened out and deal directly with it while remembering the girls are fighting adolescence and immaturity and try not to hurt their feelings. But it's going to happen."

Slover said sometimes a crush may exist by the position the coach holds, and if it happens, it's important to remember who is the person in charge.

"A lot of times, the girl is infatuated with the fact that the guy's a coach, an authority figure. It's not the guy himself."

Wrenn said it's important to know your players, and know which ones are prone to exaggerate. Also, not being some new guy in town seems to help, he said.

"I've been here for quite a while now, so I go down and work with kids in junior high. We already know each other, so that aspect seems to help," Wrenn said. "To me, this doesn't come down to the position, but the people. Like anything, it's people who make poor decisions."

And there have been enough coaches make regrettable decisions that have cost them a job, a teaching license, or landed them in prison or on probation.

"I don't think it should ever happen," said Jack Turner, girls' track coach at Palo Duro. "It's not just in athletics, but teacher/student relationships in general. I can see how, from a student's point of view, a crush might develop, especially with a younger coach, but it should really never happen."

Slover can see where something combustible between a coach and an impressionable girl could explode.

"I'm understanding of how it could happen because we're all human," Slover said. "We all have weak points throughout our life.

"You take a coach at a weak point who maybe doesn't think much of himself, I think it's possible. A coach could get thrown into a chemistry situation he needs to stay out of."

Cobb, who has coached and taught at Tascosa for 15 years, said it's inevitable that infatuations are going to occur.

"Situations are going to arise," Cobb said. "But if some coach is so egotistical that he needs that shot, he needs to grow up. It's totally inappropriate. There may be some gray area, but you better color it in as quick as you can."

Sometimes, ignorance or naivety is bliss.

"When I first came here, I was 25 years old and I was married. I can only think of one case where a girl did something," Estes said. "I had this girl, this was many years ago, who one day just kept standing there staring at me.

"She'd say these things like 'Your eyes are so beautiful.' I had no idea what she was doing. It wasn't until later that I started thinking about it that it dawned on me that she might have been flirting.

"Now if my wife had been there, she'd have noticed immediately and said that the girl was hitting on me. But I'm not really good at noticing things like that and I just went on doing my business."

Roger Clarkson, Lance Lahnert and Mike Lee of the Amarillo Globe-News contributed to this report.